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Social media has developed at a very rapid pace. It was less than a decade ago when most social media activity was limited to people under the age of 25. Since then, platforms like Facebook have grown into global drivers where people from all walks of life go on a daily basis.

As social media has become more ingrained into people’s daily routines, the companies behind these platforms continue to roll out new features to ensure they’re not left behind like previous front runners such as MySpace. One area where Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have all focused a lot of effort is on appealing to businesses.

Since almost all social media revenue comes from advertising, these platforms know that they need businesses to care about them. By providing features and tools that appeal directly to businesses, the platforms are able to accomplish those goals.

An Important Feature of Facebook Business Pages

Even though they started out as an online network exclusively for college students, Facebook has emerged as the clear leader in the social media space. With over a billion active users, Facebook plays a role in everything from elections to letting people know that someone they care about just had a baby.

Beginning in 2007, Facebook committed to helping brands reach the people they care about. This started with brand pages, followed by the concept of becoming a fan in 2009. Facebook also introduced contests and promotions in that year. While a few page features have come and gone over the years, one that has remained is the ability for people to leave reviews of pages that are associated with a local business.

Although some businesses were initially concerned that the ability to leave reviews could negatively impact their online reputation, most have found that as long as they take care of their customers, the ability for people to leave reviews is something that’s been useful. In the event that a customer does leave a mixed or negative review, promptly responding can help turn the tide. That’s why having a reviews monitoring dashboard in your mix of tools is so useful. It’s also why this feature is one of many that’s available in our social media analytics dashboard

Send Social Media Makes Social Media Review Management a Breeze

While Facebook has been a leader in encouraging users to review businesses, this type of activity occurs across all major social platforms. Since you want to know when someone is talking about your business but don’t want to spend all your time refreshing information on your screen, you’ll be happy to know that Send Social Media’s ability to monitor reviews extends across social media.

If you want to learn more about this functionality and all the others we offer, be sure to take a look at all the features of our social media monitoring dashboard.

Although social media usage and influence only continues to increase, plenty of businesses still struggle to stay on top of their social channels. Even after a business clears the initial challenges that often come up when getting started with social, it’s common to feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do. If you want your business to take advantage of everything social media has to offer but worry that you simply don’t have the resources to do so, we want to share four different ways social media automation can help you out:

Efficiently Handling a Large Number of Responses

As you build more momentum for your business through social media, the number of people who interact with your profiles will increase. While this is a good problem to have, it’s still a problem. The last thing you want to do is make potential customers feel ignored or miss a very important message. Since trying to manually go through a large number of responses across multiple platforms can take a lot of time, the ability to aggregate all responses into a single dashboard through social media automation is a huge help.

Identifying the Best Content to Share

There’s an incredible amount of content on the Internet. However, that doesn’t make it any easier to know what you should share through your social profiles. The good news is social media automation can make this decision easier. By automatically collecting analytics about how every post performs, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of what you should be posting. You can also use an integration like RSS to keep your feed interesting. And to top things off, automation gives you the ability to schedule as many posts as you want to share in advance.

Using Social Media for Customer Service

Many of the features that you’ll find on any of the major social media platforms make them ideal for providing customer service. The only downside is if you start getting too many customer service requests, it can overwhelm your current resources and cause your business to drop the ball. The good news is social media automation can solve this dilemma. By bringing all customer service issues into a single location and making it very easy to reply, your business will be able to keep up with this task regardless of the volume you receive.

Engaging with Followers in a Meaningful Way

Engagement is a huge part of social media. So how can you take your interactions with followers beyond quick comments? A great option that’s possible with the help of social media automation is group messaging and/or email marketing. These approaches will allow you to communicate in more depth with your followers.

If you want to overcome common marketing challenges by taking advantage of social media automation, get started today with a free 30-day trial of the Send Social Media Dashboard.

For others, they may view branding with a slightly negative connotation and believe it’s too abstract. While those are all valid thoughts, the right type of branding can be very important for a business. When done correctly, branding helps to define a small business and gives people a reason to connect with it.

One of the ways to move away from the abstractness sometimes associated with branding and focus more on what it can actually do for your business is to look at its most important elements. That’s why we want to cover the essential ingredients to build a brand for your small business:

What’s Your Purpose?

Building a brand starts with defining why your business exists. On the surface, this may seem like a simple question to answer. But as you dig into it, you’ll likely notice that it’s surprisingly complex. Although it can take some time to get a clear and concise answer to this question, doing so will create the foundation for the rest of your branding efforts.

Staying Consistent

A brand is something that makes a promise. The specific promise will vary from one business to the next. Regardless of the specific promise your business makes with its brand, what’s extremely important is to stay consistent with that promise. In terms of how to do that, it’s something that needs to happen at every level of your business. From how you provide customer service to the visual elements you use across the social media for your business, staying consistent will build the type of trust that your business needs in order to grow and thrive.

Involving Employees

Since purpose and consistency are key ingredients of a small business brand, it’s easy to understand why branding isn’t an activity that exists in a silo. For a brand to really mean something, every member of an organization needs to be involved. Another benefit of getting every employee fully on board with your brand is they will help you spread its message.

Building Loyalty

Employees aren’t the only ones who can spread the message of your brand. If you identify your purpose and create an organization where everyone consistently shares that message, you’ll gain loyal customers. These customers will act as evangelists for your brand and help grow it to levels via channels like word of mouth that you could have never done on your own.

Social media continues to be a very important part of building a small business brand. While staying on top of social media can seem quite challenging at times, there are ways to make it easier. Learn more about Send Social Media and how our tool will help streamline your social media efforts.

When used to talk about things that are published online, the word viral refers to content that people consume and are then compelled to share with others. For a business, the benefits of publishing viral content include increased awareness about their brand, more visitors to their website and improved search engine rankings as a result of more people linking to their site.

Although there’s no way to guarantee that a specific piece of content will go viral, there are best practices you can follow to maximize your chances of success. So without further ado, here are five viral marketing tips you’ll want to keep in mind:

1. Inspirational Stories about Real People

Humans are hardwired to respond to stories. And given how moved we all are by emotion, it’s easy to understand why human interest stories are such a powerful recipe for viral content. What’s great about this specific kind of viral content is it can help create a very positive association with your brand.

2. Quizzes

Blog posts are the most common type of online content. While the right type of blog post can definitely go viral, it’s worth noting that there are other forms of online content. Quizzes are the perfect example. BuzzFeed and other publishers have perfected this type of content. The great thing about quizzes is not only are they very engaging, but it’s easy to build in a viral hook that makes people want to share them with friends after taking them.

3. Motivational Content

Some of the most popular pieces of content on YouTube, reddit, Instagram and other social platforms are focused on motivation. The reason is most of us need a kick in the pants every once in awhile and are well aware of that fact. So when a piece of content has a strong message that’s very motivating, the people who enjoy it want to then share that same positive feeling with others.

4. Long Pieces Packed with Value

A lot of viral marketing tactics focus on crafting content that’s fun, entertaining or brings out different emotions. As we discussed above, those approaches can definitely work really well. However, you don’t necessarily have to go down that route in order for content to go viral. Another strategy is to craft “epic” pieces of content. By choosing a topic and then publishing the longest & most authoritative piece of content on it, you can make it go viral within your industry. This strategy can also work really well to rank for highly competitive keyword phrases.

Headlines are very important. Statistics show that changing a single word in an email headline can improve clickthroughs by as much as 46%. Given that huge impact, it’s easy to see why copywriting experts suggest that when you write a blog post, you should spend anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of your time on the headline.Continue reading →

When people hear the word content, blog posts are often the first thing that comes to mind. While blog posts are essential for building a brand through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, this isn’t the only form that content can take. Content can also be visual assets like pictures or other graphics. With the continued growth of Instagram, along with how well images tend to perform on Facebook and other platforms, it’s worth taking a look at how this kind of content can be used to build and spread your brand visually.Continue reading →

Having a social media engagement strategy can mean the difference between seeing significant results from your social media efforts or failing to gain any traction on social media despite posting on a regular basis. There are several reasons engagement is so important on social media. One is that it allows you to stand out above the noise. Continue reading →

If your business has spent any amount of time using Twitter, you may have heard of a feature called Twitter Cards. While this feature can be very useful for businesses, it can also be a bit confusing. That’s why we put together the following guide to help answer common questions and assist your business with putting Twitter Cards into action.Continue reading →

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